About Charles Lewton-Brain

Master goldsmith Charles Lewton-Brain is functional head of the Jewellery / Metals Program at the Alberta College of Art + Design. He is a world renowned author, educator, artist, and has pioneered the innovative suite of metal techniques known as foldforming.

Lewton-Brain's work has been recognized by the British Museum Research Lab, by a 1991 Rolex award, and in 2012 he was the recipient of the prestigious Governor General Award for his contribution to Canadian arts; visit this link for his full profile. This video was made by the Canada Council for the Arts to recognize Charles for the Governor General Award:

"Charles Lewton-Brain is one of the most knowledgeable, most celebrated and most accessible metalsmiths in North America," wrote Alan Revere in The Innovators back in 1998. In the November 2015 issue of Art Jewelry magazine, in the story "The Evolution of Foldforming" by Sue Lacy, Revere updated his observations by saying, "Charles is an outlier and a genius who thinks beyond what most of us can even conceive of. [He] opened the door to a whole new way of thinking about metal that everyone had overlooked, even though foldforming is intuitively obvious. … I am not surprised that there is a now a third generation of foldformers out there. Just like kids who grew up with computers, this generation takes foldforming for granted; it is part of their repertoire.”

Alan Revere is Founder and Director of the highly acclaimed Revere Academy of Jewelry Arts in San Francisco, CA., U.S., and served on the jury of the 2014 Lewton-Brain Foldform Competition. Click here for his write-up of Charles in his 1998 series, The Innovators. Click here to read his 2015 comments in "The Evolution of Foldforming."

Charles Lewton-Brain is a generous educator who has written thousands of pages to support metal artists. For an overview of his foldforming related resources, visit the Brain Press page on this website. He is also the author of "Foldforming," the definitive book about foldforming in the metal arts.